Pinch Me Books

This book is really good. I think it has won an award. The story was really cute. I enjoyed reading about Sara. An excellent read. Get this book now!

P.S-I'm not a kid- I don't have a login

Being both foster and adoptive parents, this is real stuff with real personalities and feelings portrayed. Wished I had read it in one sitting to get the full effect of the emotions.

The book is great for me. I only started reading this afternoon and I already love it! It's about this great Sara Moone a very interesting character whom many people will be able to relate to. Once you start this book...you won't be able to put it down. Go get it!

This book was a great read! I especially enjoyed it because I'm interested in adopting in the future, and this gave me an insight into the foster care system, albeit in Canada. The writing was great, although it's definitely a young adult book and not an adult book! The plot line would be a bit too easy for adults, but I don't think this would be a problem with younger readers (high school would be fine with it).

All in all, I really enjoyed this! I hope to read more of this author's books!

Sometimes I'm at a loss for words in reviewing Ms. Rendell's books. There are times when I'm blown away by her ingenious plotting as evidenced in The Fatal Inversion. But then I pick up another book such as this - Adam and Eve and Pinch Me - and the best I can come up with to sum up my feelings after finishing it is...ambivalent. I can take it; I can leave it, neither done with passion.

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me is peopled with the usual suspects - the damaged souls just waiting for Ms. Rendell's development and analysis. When the plot is masterful, I swallow it all up, every bit of aberrant behavior, every twist even at the expense of logic (for is there really logic in the tortured minds of Rendell characters?), and every laborious journey into their pathologies. However, when the plot is mediocre, the book is but a house of cards that comes crashing down at the slightest tremble of the literary hand. Such was my experience with A&E&PM.

It began solidly enough. We learn about Minty, our obsessive compulsive protagonist and learn about the characters that populate her everyday world. We also learn of how she's been conned by Jerry/Jock, who as it turns out, has conned other women. (The other reviewers here have done a bang-up job of summarizing the story so there's no need for me to do so.) As if Minty does not have enough of a challenge (bathing and cleaning alone take up a large part of her waking day), we learn that she's also schizophrenic. Fine, I'm still on full-tilt and raring to know what comes of this. What comes of this is more bathing and cleaning (narrated in excruciating detail) interspersed with talkative phantoms whose appearances become more aggressive as the story progressively loses steam. As if aberrant myself (masochistic), I slogged through another hundred pages of stereotyped peripheral characters and subplots to support them, all of which did nothing for the main plot. Plot? What plot? Oh, dear, I'd already forgotten what the plot was all about. Then, of course, there's the contrived and ever so convenient ending.

When all was said and done, I didn't know who was more gullible - the women who were conned for being so obtuse in divesting themselves of what little money and/or dignity they have to a sponger, or I for divesting myself of what little time I had for pleasurable reading to a mediocre publication.

Rendell is great at creating characters who grab and keep your attention, but she can also bushwhack the reader, sort of. Jerry Leach (or Jock Lewis, or Jeff Leigh, or whatever name he's using this month) is a user of women, moving in with a series of girlfriends and taking their life savings and credit cards. He starts out as the central character by virtue of his leech-like activities but -- surprise -- he becomes a victim himself almost exactly halfway through the book. Thereafter, he appears only as a ghost in the mind of Minty Knox, an obsessive-compulsive shirt-ironer for a London dry cleaner. There's also Michelle and Matthew, the former a sadly obese middle-aged woman, the latter her dangerously anorexic but loving husband. And Zillah, Jerry's featherbrained not-quite-ex-wife, who enters an ill-advised marriage of convenience with a gay conservative MP. And Minty's black neighbors, Laf and Sonovia, who don't realize how much they know. And on and on. Like many of this author's books, if properly handled, this would make a terrific film.

Rendell is such a good writer that I never feel totally unsatisfied, but, that said, it's hard to spend so much time with a dim main character. Minty is an addled spinster, yes a type, who falls in love with a con man, who takes her up more or less because he is in her neighborhood one night and is told she has money. The book is enlivened by the other characters, Minty's neighbors and her boyfriend's other conquests, and although it is interesting, and I think psychologically accurate enough to a point (the killing), Minty just isn't a good enough character for a book to be based on her. Now, the Rottweiler, with its serial killer who is offended by his press coverage, that is a character driven book that is rewarding. If you love Rendell, you'll like this one well enough. If not, then pass.

Ruth Rendell is one of my favourite authors, and this book proves why. No one can write a psychological thriller like her, and in this book she has written in a character that is obsessive=compulsive and a schizophrenic. Her ability to depict these emotional illnesses in her characters is unparalleled. Her writing skills are unique and spell-binding. In this book we have three women living in different parts of London that don't know each other, but are inescapably bound together by their involvement with a man. The tension builds and builds throughout the book until the explosive ending.

Because Ruth Rendell's last few outings have been vaguely disappointing, I approached this most recent book with a little reluctance if not outright trepidation. In fact, it sat in my bedside book pile far longer than a Rendell would usually have done in the past. But I needn't have feared...she's back in form and this is an absolutely fascinating character study of men and women and need and manipulation. There are several main characters here whose lives intertwine most unusually, and it is hard to decide who is the best-written of these. They all spring to life with their own unique collections of human foibles and motivations and they are all on a collision course, each with the other. You can see the train wreck coming, but you can't avert your eyes.